Second Chance Friends (25 page)

“I should put Rose down for a nap,” I said, hurrying over to you. I plucked you out of the bear's lap and felt the sweaty contours of you against my arms. You had a smear of icing across one cheek. Your dress was grass-stained. You smirked in your sleep, just the way Michael always had. I kissed your cheek, a perfect moment in the midst of a billion imperfect ones.

I carried you past Karen, Melinda, and Joanna as they chatted excitedly about wedding plans and baby kicks and
theater. I listened to them all the way inside, until the walls muted their voices to whispers and then to silence. I smiled at my fortune. Can you believe that, Rose? I smiled at how lucky I was. How lucky I still am. Those three ladies kept me alive. Karen, Melinda, and Joanna were the reason I could smile.

On September 2, my husband, Michael Christopher Routh, was killed instantly when a school bus lost control on Highway 32 and crashed into our car.

On that day, I met Karen Freeman, Melinda Crocker, and Joanna Chambers.

They say you have friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for a lifetime.

Somehow I got lucky and got all three at once.

Q.
Second Chance Friends
begins when a perfectly ordinary day in the lives of three different women, all of whom are having breakfast in a local diner, is disrupted by a car accident in the intersection outside. Why did you want to use that particular event to kick off the novel?

A. I love stories that explore connections. I think one of the most important tasks of our lives is making connections, even just in ordinary moments. But I've long wondered about connections made in extraordinary times as well. A few years ago, there was a horrific accident involving a school bus at a very busy intersection in my town. Certainly, there were many witnesses, and my heart went out to them. I began to wonder what would happen if a few of them continued to meet—even if accidentally at first. How would the uniqueness of what they experienced together affect their relationships with one another? Would they feel more connected? Would they forge friendships? Would they help one another get through the healing? This book had been writing itself in my head ever since.

Q. As the novel moves forward, the chapters are told from the perspectives of three different women: Karen, Melinda, and
Joanna. They're unique women with very different personalities. Yet you develop each one with rich details and careful attention. When you write different characters, do you love them all? Do they come to you fully formed or do you discover them along the way?

A. I do love them all, but there is usually one who will endear herself to me a little more than the others. She will speak the loudest and seem the most human to me. That doesn't mean the others don't also speak and seem human—it only means they're a little quieter than she is. In this case, I felt a particular connection with Joanna. She had all this love and passion that she wanted to share, yet fear kept her in hiding. I think we can all relate to that on some level—fear of being who we really are—and know how painful and damaging that anxiety can be. I was really rooting for Joanna.

I like to get to know my characters as real people before I begin writing, so I spend a lot of time writing character sketches before I start each novel. I get to know their appearance and mannerisms, their worries and desires, their family dynamics and their motivations. Yet even after all of that work, they always still manage to surprise me at some point in the novel. So, yes, I begin with fully formed characters in mind . . . and, yes, I discover them along the way, too.

Q. There is, of course, a fourth woman in the novel, Maddie, who is pivotal to the story. We see her in many of the chapters,
but we are shown her perspective only in the epilogue. Why did you make that choice?

A. Mostly because Maddie's perspective would have been so bleak throughout most of the novel that I think it would have been too heavy and hopeless. With Karen, Melinda, and Joanna, they had their problems, and even had moments of real pain, but they were hopeful. They were reaching out and connecting with one another. Maddie had no faith, and she was pulling away, shutting herself off at every opportunity. It wasn't until she'd begun to see that she had a future that I felt it was safe for her voice to shine through.

Q. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, you've also used quite a bit of humor in the book, especially between Karen and her friend Antoinette. Was it hard to balance the light and dark moments as you wrote?

A. Even though my novels often revolve around more somber subject matters, I have written a lot of humor, too. In fact, I wrote a weekly humor column for the
Kansas City Star
for more than four years. So humor comes very naturally for me, and sometimes I think we need those moments of levity, even in the gloomiest hours, just to take a breath and keep our sanity. It's human nature to seek relief. So I wasn't so much bogged down by
trying to keep a balance as I was popping up with a reminder that there is a “better” out there waiting for the four friends (and for us) to arrive.

Q. At the end of the book, Maddie reflects, “They say you have friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for a lifetime.” This quote has the ring of knowledge handed down through the ages. Is it something you've heard before? Or something that came to you in the writing of this book?

A. I've heard this saying many times, and have always loved the truth of it. Sometimes I've even heard it taken a step further, that when you figure out which one of those things someone in your life is, you will know what to do with that person. I've tried to find the origin of the saying, but it doesn't have a clear attribution that I can find.

Q. In your first work of women's fiction,
The Sister Season
, you wrote about three estranged sisters returning home to the family farm. They are coming to celebrate the holidays, but they are also coming to bury their father. What one might have expected to be a joyful event becomes quite complicated. Here, you've begun with a tragic accident, and yet the four women the story focuses on actually grow through that event and rediscover joy at the end. Is it your hope to explore the unexpected emotional journeys we take in your stories?

A. Yes, I think life is one big unexpected emotional
journey, and it's what we do and learn along the way that makes us remarkable. I think that it's in the moments of great joy and great sorrow that we find parts of ourselves we never knew existed, and sometimes what we find can be so profound as to change us forever. It's rather amazing, when you think about it, how much there is to discover in even the darkest, dustiest, most frightening corners of our souls.

Q.
Second Chance Friends
is a rich, complicated book that will impress readers in different ways. Is there something you especially want readers to come away with after they've turned the final page?

A. That there is always opportunity for reaching out and connecting. I would hope for my readers to come away looking for places where they can connect with someone else, likely or unlikely, and be the blessing in that person's life, even if only for a season.

Q. What's next for you in your writing life?

A. One of the things I love most about writing is that I'm never quite sure what's up next! I love to experiment and follow new stories and ideas and genres. But one thing I can be certain of is that I will continue to weave the threads of hope in tragedy, and the blessing of human connection—in ordinary times and extraordinary ones—into all of my stories.

1. Small-town diners are often pictured as meeting places—places where we can see familiar faces, catch up on the neighborhood gossip, and enjoy a sense of inclusion. This story begins in such a place. But with the rise of social media and electronic devices, we're also finding virtual communities. Do you still find a sense of community in places such as diners and bookstores in your neighborhood? Do you participate in virtual communities? Do you find these two things at odds with each other? Do they enhance each other?

2. The story is told mostly from the point of view of three different women: Karen, Melinda, and Joanna. Did one of them resonate with you more than the others? If so, why? Do you find yourself often drawn to the same types of characters in the books you read?

3. After the accident, Karen, Melinda, and Joanna decide to search out Maddie, the young woman in the accident. They come, unbidden, into her life. Do you believe them when they say they're acting purely out of concern for
her? Are they being nosy? Are they being supportive? Are these two sides of the same coin?

4. Discuss the different issues of motherhood the characters struggle with as the story builds. Think of Karen and her wayward son, or Melinda, who quietly deceives her husband to avoid having a child, and Maddie, who initially doesn't want the child she'll have. How do the women help one another through these issues? Does one of these issues resonate with you more than the others?

5. Romantic love and sexual identity are also issues confronting the characters. Think about their different conflicts in this area. Joanna, of course, comes readily to mind. But think also of Karen, who is in a very different phase of her life, and of Melinda, who is married. What challenges are they facing in their romantic lives? Do you think they work through them successfully? Do you feel they have work left to do when the story ends?

6. There are many secrets in this book—secrets the characters hide from themselves and from others. List the secrets you observe. Do they remain at the conclusion of the story? Do you have secrets you keep—from your friends, your family, or yourself? Do you think revealing them would help enrich your life? Are there times secrets are best kept concealed?

7. For women who become mothers, balancing the physical and emotional demands of a job with the role of motherhood can be difficult. In this story, Karen seems to be able to use her job to strengthen her position as a parent and grandparent. But Melinda decides she needs to leave her job as an EMT in order to be a mother. Do you understand their decisions? Do you believe them? Do you feel you've had to make similar choices in your own life?

8. For Joanna. the arts, and in particular theater, play a crucial role in her personal development. Has artistic expression helped you understand something about yourself?

9. The epilogue is a critical part of this story. What role does it play? Why do you imagine the author chose to write it in this format? And are the characters where you thought they might be in their lives?

10. This book begins with a tragedy—with an accident that claims lives. Yet it ends with great joy—a child is born and friendships have blossomed. So would you call it a sad book? A happy book? An honest book? Why? Have you had experiences that you feel are similar to what the women here have shared? Do you believe we can heal from the tragedies we've endured? Do they
weaken us? Strengthen us? Or perhaps simply change us?

I
t was what should have been dinnertime in the Epperson house when the phone rang. Of course, it wasn't actually dinnertime. Not officially. It hadn't officially been dinnertime in the Epperson house since Kevin, leaving a trail of balled socks and loose change and mementos of a lost age—football cards stuck upright in the cracks of the baseboards, a Sanibel sand dollar plucked from the ocean an impossibly short decade ago, figurines from the imaginative days of childhood—left the house with a passport and only half a harebrained plan. And quite a bit of cannabis,
from the smell of him. Oh, he could deny it, but a mother knew when the eyes of her child weren't right.

Her youngest. Her baby. A once-treasured bedroom now home to only forgotten Super Balls and soccer pads and slippers, rock band posters and a rat's nest of old phone chargers, and the college textbooks he'd foolishly purchased before he'd decided to admit that he wasn't planning to go, all abandoned.

He'd left with a jacket, a pocketful of snacks, and a sleeping bag harnessed along the underside of a backpack, for Christ's sake.
Isn't he taking this backpacking-across-the-world business a little far?
How can he possibly have packed enough to live off of in that thing?
Brenda had asked Gary, who'd sat on his parked motorcycle looking one-tenth worried for Kevin and nine-tenths envious out of his gourd.
Oh, he'll be fine, Brenda. Let him explore. This is important. You don't want him to turn around in thirty years and regret that he never went.
Bren had rolled her eyes. Of course Gary would make this about himself. Ever since the man turned the corner into the back side of his forties, he'd managed to make everything about himself. God love the old oafish bastard.

And so Kevin had hugged her and made promises about phone calls and postcards and a future that she knew would never come true and had hopped into his friend Tony's idling 2000 Toyota, checked his pocket for his passport one last time, and set off for the airport—a flick of his wrist through the passenger-side window for a wave, a fog of alternative music the last souvenir of her son to leave the block he'd grown up on.

Epperson family dinners whisked away, just like that.

At last check-in—it must have been at least three weeks ago—Kevin was just pulling into Cesky Krumlov, which Bren had made him spell so she could look it up on the
Internet. Somewhere in the Czech Republic, he'd said. He'd dropped his iPod in the Vltava River, but he didn't care, he'd said. He'd met a girl, he'd said. Her name was Pavlina; she was an artist—
like, a real artist, not one of those weird girls who use creative stirrings as their excuse not to shave their pits, Mom.
Pavlina didn't believe in shoes, and she was the most beautiful thing he'd seen yet, and that included all the Roman sculptures and paintings combined. He was smitten, but was telling Bren this as if dictating a travelogue, as he always did. Sounding removed, dutiful. Bren forever fretted that there would be a test at the end of his phone calls. She never talked to him without a pencil and a pad of paper—what she thought of as her telephone pad—so she could write down all the confusing foreign-sounding things he said. When they hung up, she felt like a completed chore. A
confused
completed chore.

This time, the ringing phone had a +66 country code at the front of it. Bren, eating cheese on toast—her fourth piece—and idly filling out a magazine quiz while the news
droned on the tiny kitchen TV, a persistent buzzing of negativity and fear-mongering that both frightened her and made her feel superior, jumped at the receiver.

“Hello?” and then, covering the mouthpiece with her palm, “Gary! It's Kelsey! Kelsey is calling!” Then, back into the phone, “Hello?”

A strange click, some faraway hissing. “Mommy?”

Bren's breath caught. She loved that her daughter had never gotten too old to call her Mommy, but had to admit that hearing the word
Mommy
coming out of her daughter's mouth, even at twenty-four years old, even married and a whole continent away, brought to mind skinned knees and Barbie dolls, an eight-year-old Kelsey who would never grow any older.

“Kelsey!” she exclaimed. “How's Thailand?”

“Oh, Mommy, it's beautiful. The rain has stopped and it's so warm. Perfect, really. We're getting ready for Loi Krathong here. Do you know what that is? Have you ever seen it?”

Bren scrambled for her telephone pad and pencil, flipped to the
Kelsey
page, and scribbled down
Loy Rithong
. “I've never even heard of . . . Did you say
Rithong
with an
R
?”

Kelsey giggled. “A
K
, Mommy. A
K
. Krathong. We make these little boats and fill them with flowers and candles and coins. We're making ours out of bread to feed the fish—our boat. That was Dean's idea. Isn't that a great idea, Mommy, to make it out of bread?” Bren nodded, but there wasn't time to speak between Kelsey's breathless sentences. Kelsey always got that way, especially when she talked about her new
husband. “He's so smart about things, even though we're still learning. It's like he's lived here his whole life. Anyway, so, you float these little boats down the river during the full moon. It's like an offering, Mommy, but it's also symbolic. It symbolizes letting go of your hatred and anger and bitterness, and there are lanterns, so many lanterns, and, gosh, it just sounds so beautiful. Doesn't it sound beautiful?”

“Yes, beautiful,” Bren said, but she'd gotten behind on her notes. “Wait—you have hatred and anger?”

“It's symbolic, Mommy.”

“Symbolic hatred,” Bren said, writing down the words as she spoke them.

“So, what are you and Daddy doing this evening? It must be about dinnertime there. I just woke up. I'm waiting for Dean to get out of the shower. We're playing hooky and going to the beach today. I'm telling you, Mommy, someday you and Daddy simply must come visit us. We have space. Dean said he would make space—isn't that the sweetest? He's so thoughtful that way, you know. Always worrying about everyone else. He would probably give you our bed and would sleep outside on the ground if that was what you wanted. You must come and let him be thoughtful to you, Mommy. It would mean the world to him. And you would be amazed by these beaches. The water—it's so clear. You've never seen water like that in Missouri—I can tell you that much.”

Ah. There it was. The requisite Missouri-bashing that both her kids had to do on a regular basis now that they had moved on to such exotic locales. As if nothing good ever
could have come from a place as bland as the Midwest. As if they both had not come from the Midwest themselves.

Bren wrote the word
beache
—misspelled, after overthinking that it might have some foreign iteration like all the other things she'd been writing down—then scratched it out and wrote
hooky
instead, then scratched that out, too, and put down her pencil.

“So?” Kelsey asked.

“
So
what?”

Impatient grunt, followed by a giggle. Kelsey's signature. The girl moved like a hummingbird, always zooming on to the next thing, the next conversation, the next song, the next location. “So, what are you and Daddy doing tonight?” she repeated.

“Oh, that,” Bren said. Her head felt swimmy, stuffed too full of information. She placed her hand over the phone receiver again. “Gary!” Nothing. She went to the garage door and pounded on it with the flat of her hand three times, marital code for
Get your ass in here
. “Gary!”

“Daddy in the garage again?” Kelsey asked. “Still working on that motorcycle?”

“Yes and no,” Bren said. “He's onto dune buggies now. It's a long story. I suppose we're not doing anything tonight. Although I'd hoped to catch up on some of my recorded shows.”

“Well, that's boring. Honestly, Mommy, you should get out sometimes.”

Bren's hand went to the back of her head. “I get out. I went to the hairdresser today.”

“The hairdresser? What, are you ninety? I mean
get out
get out. Do something fun. Go dancing. You're empty nesters now. You have freedom!”

Don't remind me,
Bren thought, thinking for the thousandth time what an awful term
empty nester
was. So lonely, evoking images of things dried and barren. It was bad enough to feel that way without putting a name to it, too.

Bren found herself stuttering, nothing intelligible coming out, as her daughter continued to talk over her with suggestions of things to do—fancy dinners, romantic river cruises, day trips, double dates, clubs—followed by condemnation for sitting around and rotting at home, then doomsday predictions of what happened to old couples who didn't thrive, old people who didn't leave the house.

“They die younger, Mommy. Did you know that? Retired people who get out and do things live longer.”

“We're not retired,” Bren found herself saying bewilderedly. “I'm only forty-five. Your father's not yet fifty.”

“It's here before you know it,” Kelsey said in a very sage voice, as if a twenty-four-year-old knew the first thing about the advancement of time.

There was a thundering of footsteps, and Gary came into the room, reeking of gas, wiping his hands on a filthy towel. Grateful for the excuse to interrupt this discussion, Bren set the phone on the table and hit the speaker button.

“Hey there, princess!” Gary said without waiting for an opening.
Exactly where Kelsey got the chatty gene—right there.

“Daddy!” Kelsey squealed. If they'd been visiting in person, she would have wrapped her entire body around
him the way she always had. Such a daddy's girl. He took her marriage and moving much easier than Bren thought he would. Although Bren still wasn't allowing herself to fully think about it yet, either, so she had no real idea how hard she was going to take it when she finally let down her barrier and allowed it to sink in full force.

She'd always had a vague fear that one of her children would move away.
Away
away, not college away or different town away or even different state away. But she'd never have guessed that one of them would actually go and do it. Not to mention both of them. Where had she gone wrong that both of them suddenly wanted to be
away
away?

Kelsey had been married for exactly forty-six minutes before she'd made her way to the middle of the reception dance floor, grabbed the mic, and announced that Dean was accepting a new job (pause for polite applause) and that it was a really great opportunity (pause for excited grin) and that they would be moving (pause for hopping on toes) to exotic and beautiful Thailand (pause for confetti and balloons and a goddamned unicorn shitting heart-shaped puppies all over the place). Bren had smiled and clapped with the others, all the while trying to remember whether Thailand was a place with big, scary insects or a place with big, scary diseases or a place with big, scary kidnappers. Or maybe all of the above. She was quite possibly the first mother of the bride in all of history to wonder aloud, at the reception, whether her daughter was up-to-date on all her immunizations.

Oh, Gary had taken it hard at first. But he'd gotten over it so quickly. How did he do that? Kelsey had now been
gone for six months and it already felt like six years, but to listen to Gary, to watch him as he putzed around on his dune buggy without a care in the world and as he casually chatted with his daughter on the phone—no pad and pencil required—you would never have known the girl had been gone at all.

“How are things Down Under?” he asked.

This got the usual giggle from Kelsey. “We're not that close to Australia, Daddy.”

“Oh, does that mean you haven't a pet kangaroo yet? Well, then, I'm never coming to visit.”

More laughter. They were so cute together, those two. It made the bridge of Bren's nose ache. She pinched it, wondering whether she should write down
kangaroo.
Out of nowhere, her shoulder itched. She shrugged a few times, the friction from her bra strap scratching it.

“How's Dean-o?” Gary asked, his voice booming, making Bren flinch.

“Oh, he's just great. His project is going well and it looks like he may get a contract extension, which we're so excited about. We haven't seen nearly enough of Thailand yet. We'd like to stay a few more years.”

“Years?”
Bren barked, and then slapped her mouth shut. She'd vowed to never make either of the children feel guilty about their decisions to live lives separate from hers—even if they were so carelessly breaking her heart—but she couldn't help it. Years was a long time. Years was long enough for her to miss the birth of a grandchild. Years was
long enough to put down roots, real roots, the kind of roots that you don't want to dig up.

“Well, you tell him we said hello and to keep up the good work,” Gary boomed as if Bren had never said anything at all. Thank God.

“So, I can't talk for much longer,” Kelsey said, her voice going down at the edges. “Trying to save money where I can.”

“That's my girl,” Gary said. “Levelheaded.”

Bren shot him a look. As if saving pennies by shortchanging her own parents on phone calls while lollygagging on a beach all day instead of working was a fiscally responsible decision.